evangelicals

Baylor University scholar Alan Jacobs reflects on Mike Pence and the journalists who cover him:

VP Mike Pence says, “Criticism of Christian education in America must stop.” No it musn’t. Nobody and nothing is above criticism. Demanding that others stop criticizing your preferred group is a cheap identity-politics move. It would simply be a good thing if the critics made some effort to understand what they’re criticizing, though of course that’s not going to happen. I can’t imagine a cohort less likely to inform itself about conservative Christianity than the cohort of American journalists.

My caveat: There is a growing number of excellent journalists covering the religion beat who do try to understand conservative Christianity.

Here are the results of the latest National Public Radio/PBS/Marist poll:

A new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll finds Trump’s approval rating down and his disapproval rating up from a month ago. He currently stands at 39 percent approve, 53 percent disapprove — a 7-point net change from December when his rating was 42 percent approve, 49 percent disapprove.

And the movement has come from within key portions of his base. He is:

Down significantly among suburban men, a net-positive approval rating of 51-to-39 percentto a net-negative of 42 percent approve, 48 percent disapprove. That’s a net change of down 18 percentage points.

Down a net of 13 points among white evangelicals, from 73-to-17 percent approve to 66-to-23 percent approve.

Down a net of 10 points among Republicans,from 90-to-7 percent approve to 83-to-10 percent.

Down marginally among white men without a college degree, from 56-to-34 percent approve to 50-to-35 percent approve, a net change downward of 7 points.

“Are you sure you belong on the evangelical channel?” the Patheos director of content asked me over the phone. It’s a fair question.

A couple months ago over breakfast a pastor friend from my evangelical denomination expressed his concern with what he called my “Mennonitism.” He seemed to think Anabaptist theology is incompatible with evangelicalism and to equate Anabaptism with liberalism.

The irony is that the denomination in which we both pastor was started by Mennonites who had been kicked out of the Mennonite church for their progressive methods and ideals—like singing four-part harmony, holding tent revivals, and embracing women in leadership.

The suspicion can run both ways. Last fall evangelical historian John Fea spoke at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary (AMBS, the seminary where I work) and was told in no uncertain terms by one Mennonite theologian in attendance that evangelical theology is itself responsible for the violence and racism prevalent in American society. After the interaction Fea wrote that he “realized that Anabaptism and Evangelicalism are quite different, especially when it comes to the theology of the atonement and the role that doctrine plays in Christian identity.”

Right out of the gate in today’s Conference on Faith and History session at AHA19, both Kristin Kobes Du Mez and Jemar Tisby responded to the recent Twitter debate over whether or not Phillis Wheatley should be considered an evangelical. Esteemed historian of Evangelicalism Mark Noll also entered the fray in the Q&A session that followed the presentation of papers.

For those (like Noll) who hadn’t followed the social media discussion, here’s a short summary. In early December of last year, historian Thomas Kidd tweeted a Gospel Coalition post he wrote, titled “Phillis Wheatley: An Evangelical and the First Published African American Female Poet.” Religion journalist Jonathan Merritt replied, “Assigning her the label of Evangelical is weird,” to which Kidd asked, “Why?” As Du Mez put it in describing the exchange after that, “things devolved quickly from there ….”

In her paper, “Race, Gender, and the 81 Percent: Defining Evangelicalism and What’s at Stake,” Du Mez posed the question: Who are evangelicals and does that label even mean anything anymore? Her answer to both parts of that question, in short, was that it depends on who’s asking. To make that point she briefly discussed themes that she’s written about extensively over at the Anxious Bench, such as the ideas that “Evangelicalism is an imagined religious community” and that “there are, in fact, many Evangelicalisms.” When considering the more nuanced and seemingly academic responses (compared to the Twitterbate) given to the question by LifeWay in December of 2017 and the Voter Study Group in September of 2018, she referred to a piece by Tim Gloege on Rewire.News, in which he questioned the motivation, methodology, and conclusions of such studies conducted in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. Noting the vested interest that people such as Russell Moore and Ed Stetzer had in rehabilitating the image of evangelicals both during and after that election, Du Mez also stated that it’s worth interrogating why mostly conservative, white, male evangelicals are the ones trying to define what the word evangelical means today.

As one would hope and expect, Du Mez insisted that we must approach the question historically. It is not appropriate to use a static definition of the word. “History didn’t end in the early to mid-nineteenth century,” she noted wryly. To study more closely that change over time, Du Mez conducted a linguistic analysis of the word evangelical. What she found was that before the 1970s and 1980s, the word was primarily used as an adjective. Since that time, it has primarily been used as a noun. She also found that from 1996 on, the word has been used to connotate a political alignment, not a theological one. And as she came to discover during one fortuitous visit to Hobby Lobby (also a post worth reading on the Anxious Bench), to contextualize evangelicalism in our current time is to realize that much of it is a white religious brand rooted in consumer culture, Christian Nationalism, and patriarchy. Today, sadly, “James Dobson and Duck Dynasty have more to do with Evangelicalism than Whitefield or Edwards.” And while many people view the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention that started in 1979 as being about orthodoxy, Du Mez argued that it was far more about gender.

For Du Mez then, the issues of race, gender, and power (not belief alone, as the Bebbington Quadrilateral lays out) must be considered when defining the cultural meaning of the word evangelical. To that end, it’s understandable how Merritt found labeling an enslaved African woman such as Phillis Wheatley an evangelical weird in the context of today, even if historically she was part of the trans-Atlantic movement of protestant Christian revivalism that swept the Anglo world in her lifetime, the influence of which is evident in her writings.

Du Mez’s examination of the question who is evangelical dovetailed nicely with Jemar Tisby’s paper, “Are Black Christians Evangelicals? A Multi-perspectival Assessment.” To answer that query, he used theologian John Frames concept of Tri-Perspectivalism, examining it from a normative, situational, and existential framework. From the normative perspective, using the Bible and Bebbington, it is quite easy to label most Black Christians evangelical. According to Tisby, the normative frame only considers a person’s theological beliefs, and this is what Kidd did with Wheatley. Using the situational perspective, however, forced Tisby to ask if Black Christians in America could be considered evangelical in every historical, cultural, and geographic context. The answer there was clearly no. Sunday mornings only became the most segregated time of the week after the Civil War – it wasn’t always that way. Lastly, the existential frame required him to take personal experience and self-identification into account when deciding who is and isn’t evangelical. From that perspective, he pointed out, there are many blacks today who do claim the label (as evidenced by organizations such as the NBEA), even if, according to Pew, more than three in four black protestants belong to historically black churches, as opposed to evangelical or mainline denominations.

In the end, Tisby was comfortable with not answering the question, claiming that such a response was the best way to think historically about it. “Let the ambiguity remain,” he concluded. As he had just demonstrated, when deciding whether Black Christians are evangelicals, the answer should always depend on the angle of inquiry.

During the question and answer session, Mark Noll provided his own tweet-sized take on the debate and the topic before the panel. “Whether Wheatley was an evangelical or not is irrelevant,” said Noll. “Who is or isn’t an evangelical is really not an important historical question.” He continued, “I don’t think evangelicals exist … evangelical movements exist, evangelical theology exists, but evangelical individuals are a useful fiction.” From Noll’s perspective, the session had been a valuable one, but he hoped that nobody would follow up on it.

Some of you may recall back in July 2017 when we featured University of Alabama religion professor’s Mike Altman‘s book Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu at The Author’s Corner. It is an excellent book from an excellent scholar of American religion.

Today on Twitter, Altman, in response to ongoing debates about whether or not Phillis Wheatley was an evangelical, wrote this:

Evangelical historians want Phillis Wheatley to be an evangelical for the same basic reasons that David Barton wants Thomas Jefferson to be an orthodox Christian.

I can’t speak for other historians who share my evangelical faith, but I call Wheatley an evangelical not because I want to claim her today, but because the word “evangelical” is the best way of understanding her in her 18th-century context. Most early American historians would agree. Here is J.L. Bell, the prolific historical blogger from Boston 1775 (and my response):

Christians & ex-Christians (evangelical, mainline, progressive, conservative) go crazy over this debate & claim the other side is being presentist/anachronistic. Early Am. historians can’t figure out what all the hand-wringing is all about. Of course Wheatley was evangelical. https://t.co/ENTsAcC9Wc

So, in other words, I argue that “evangelical” is a term we can use to describe Wheatley because I think it best explains her religious beliefs in the context of the world in which she lived. Just because the word “evangelical” has now become associated with other things (as I argue indirectly in Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump) does not mean it is not useful in the eighteenth-century. If I were to quit evangelicalism, as I threatened to do after November 8, 2016, I would still say “evangelical” is the best word to describe Wheatley in her time. The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.

This whole debate is part of the reason I wrote Why Study History?: Reflecting on the Importance of the Past. Some critics have said that the book errs too far to the historicist side, but it is precisely for the issues under debate here that I wanted to use this book to call attention to what Gordon Wood calls the “pastness of the past.” It takes discipline to understand the past on its own terms. This requires putting aside our contemporary views and trying our best to see the world from the perspective of those living in the past. As Sam Wineburg writes, it is our “psychological condition at rest” to find something useful in the past–something we can use to advance our agenda in the present. But mature historical thinking–to understand the foreignness of the past–is an “unnatural act.” As I argue in Why Study History, it can also be a transformative act.

Moreover, if Altman is right about “evangelical historians,” then why have so many of us (myself perhaps more than most) written extensively about the fact that Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, and many other founders were not Christians? And why are we so critical of those, like David Barton, who argue that the founders were Christians? Wouldn’t we want to argue that the founders were evangelicals so they we can get them our side in the present?

And I call Wheatley an evangelical for the same reason I don’t call Jefferson (or Adams or Franklin) a Christian.

To what extent should non-academics defer to academic historians on matters of history? John Fea faulted Merritt for being snarky and dismissive (“maybe you should think some more”) to a historian who has written books about precisely the subject matter at hand. Rather attempt to define the word “evangelical” on Twitter, Kidd recommended that Merritt “check out my books on the topic, including my definition of evangelicalism.” Good idea!

I’ve of two minds here. If someone told me that I should think more about whether Mormons are Christians, I might point him or her to my book on the subject. On the other hand, the recommendation of one’s books as an answer to a question rarely goes over well.

And at his personal blog The Pietist Schoolman, Chris Gehrz (editor-in-chief at The Anxious Bench), reflects on the dust-up in the context of his own work as a historian and generalist.

A taste:

I’ve only half-followed the recent Twitter dust-up between historians Thomas Kidd and John Fea and journalist Jonathan Merritt. You can get caught up to speed with this morning’s Anxious Benchpost from John Turner. Throw in editor John Wilson (who rose to the historians’ defense), and you’ve got several of my favorite Johns/Jonathans sparring over what it meant to be evangelical in the 18th century — especially if you were an enslaved African American like poet Phillis Wheatley.

All of that is interesting, and pointing at some philosophical questions about doing the history of evangelicalism (as Fea explained this morning in part two of a new series on the topic). But I was actually more struck by a larger issue: the place of expertise in an age of Twitter.

(This is the second post in a series on the word “evangelical” in the eighteenth-century and today).

In my first post in this three-post series, I made the case that there was a religious movement in the eighteenth-century that can be identified as “evangelical.” Of course I could never make this case in just one blog post, so I cited several prominent scholars who have made the case in a much more thorough way.

I also noted in that post that the word “evangelical” is a contested term. Today there are historians who believe that doctrine, theology, or spirituality is not the best way to define the word. In other words, these scholars believe that the “evangelical” movement in America (and elsewhere?) is really about something other than religious experience. It is really about white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism or nationalism (at least primarily).

Tim Gloege is a historian who believes that the definition of “evangelical” should not be tied primarily to theological. religious, or spiritual principles. In a January 2018 piece at the old Religion Dispatches, he took a few shots at the “Bebbington Quadrilateral,” historian David Bebbington’s four-point definition of what it means to be “evangelical.” For Bebbington, an evangelical is someone who believes in:

Conversionism: The belief that one must be “born-again” through a conversion experience that will result in a life of following Jesus.

Activism: The belief that one must express one’s born-again faith in the proclamation of the gospel through missionary and social justice efforts.

Biblicism: The view that the Bible is the word of God and the ultimate guide to Christian living

Crucicentrism: The belief that Jesus redeemed humanity through his death on the cross.

Gloege argues that there are many manifestations of Christianity, (and even non-Christian religions) that affirm Bebbington’s four points. If this is true, he asks, what makes the Bebbington Quadrilateral unique to evangelical religion? (“Muslims convert too,” he writes). Writing in the context of evangelical support for Donald Trump, Gloege believes that anyone who uses the Bebbington Quadrilateral to define what it means to be “evangelical” is trying to advance an “agenda.” In this case, he casts his net widely. Those who believe that the Bebbington Quadrilateral is a useful interpretive tool are ignoring the fact that being “evangelical” has less to do with one’s sincerely held religious beliefs and more to do with racism, patriarchy, free-market capitalism, or the policing of sexual ethics. (I responded to this piece, in the context of present-day evangelicalism, here).

I am not sure if Gloege would say that the Bebbington Quadrilateral is useful for understanding 18th-century evangelicals. His piece in Religion Dispatches seems to be mostly concerned with twentieth and twenty-first century evangelicals. (Gloege’s wrote his dissertation and book on Moody Bible Institute). If he does not find the Bebbington Quadrilateral useful to interpret the evangelical movement in the 18th century, he is not alone. Many historians of the period agree with him, but for very different reasons.

In my last post, I noted that some eighteenth-century historians, including Doug Winiarski, believe that the Bebbington Quadrilateral does not go far enough in defining 18th-century evangelical religion. But rather than seeing the 18th-century evangelical movement as a guise for racism, patriarchy, or something else, Winiarski thinks Bebbington’s category of “conversionism” is too “flat.” He thinks that evangelicals in early New England were defined by a spiritually powerful experience of the New Birth that transformed their lives in profound ways–a type of conversion that was much more radical, Holy Spirit-empowered, and instantaneous than the old Puritan “morphology of conversion.” Thomas Kidd makes a similar argument in his history of the First Great Awakening. If Gloege wants to apply his Religion Dispatches argument to the 18th-century (and, again, I am not sure he does), he is going to have to engage with these historians and others.

In my view, the eighteenth-century evangelical movement must be defined primarily by the born-again experience (as Jesus taught in the Bible, as centered on the cross, and as an impetus for evangelism, missionary work, and social justice). This, it seems, is the only way to distinguish someone associated with the evangelical movement from someone who was not.

Gloege says that “a definition should connect to a movement’s most salient features (what sets it apart).” Agreed. Were 18th-century evangelicals patriarchal, racist (by today’s definition), entrepreneurial, etc.? Of course they were. So were most other 18th-century British-Americans: Old Lights, Old Sides, Deists, continental Protestants (Lutherans, Huguenots, Dutch Reformed), Catholics, Jews, etc…. Even the Quakers, if recent historiography is correct, were a bunch of wealth-seeking slave-holders who “prayed for their enemies” on Sunday and “preyed on their enemies” during the rest of the week. I am not suggesting that we should ignore these darker dimensions of eighteenth-century life, but none of them really make evangelicals unique or set them apart from the rest of British provincial culture. But their religious beliefs do set them apart. And most people living in the 18th century also believed that the religious beliefs and spiritual practices of evangelicals set them apart.

Another scholar who wants to suggest that “evangelical” is more than a spiritual term is Calvin College historian Kristen Kobes Du Mez.

Obvious to you and me. Not obvious to those who don’t know the history/historiography. Merritt knows enough of that history, so he should know better. Not trying to defend his sloppy attack. But many of us have been contesting a (primarily) doctrinal definition.

I embedded this tweet for its final sentence. Du Mez notes that she is part of a group (“us”) who have been “contesting a (primarily) doctrinal definition” of evangelical religion. Gloege is part of that group.

In a piece at The Anxious Bench blog, Du Mez historicizes the term “evangelical” in a way Gloege does not.. She writes (along with her co-author Hannah Butler):

Thinking of evangelicalism as a historical and a cultural movement invites closer scrutiny to the centrality of racial identity, patriarchal power, and Christian nationalism in shaping the contours of the movement, and to the politicization of American evangelicalism that has occurred over the past half century.

It’s important to realize that this isn’t the first time “evangelicalism” has been a topic of public conversation. And it’s not the first time that the term has been reinvented. In fact, linguistic analysis reveals multiple shifts in meaning, and these shifts often correlate with spikes in public usage. In other words, people talk about evangelicalism more when its meaning is shifting. (Or, the more people talk about evangelicalism, the more its meaning can shift).

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term emerged in Germany and Switzerland as a way to distinguish the Lutheran from the “Reformed,” or Calvinist church. In Germany, “evangelical” came to signify Lutheranism specifically, or Protestantism more generally. Circa 1537, the OED reports that “evangelical” also began to signify being “characteristic of the Gospel dispensation,” and did so until 1875. During the 18th century, “evangelical” also came to specify a particular doctrine of salvation by faith, a definition continuing into the 1890s.

Looking to American history, one can observe shifts in the meaning of the term “evangelical” through corpus analysis, the study of linguistic phenomena through analysis of language corpora, or collections of words.

Again, if we examine evangelical religion historically, should we conclude that it has always been a movement defined primarily by “racial identity, patriarchal power, and Christian nationalism”? Are these the things that “set evangelicals apart,” to use Gloege’s phrase? How do we distinguish an 18th-century evangelical from everyone else in the century who believed in white supremacy, patriarchal power, and Christian (British) nationalism?

Once we establish that 18th-century evangelical religion was defined primarily by a belief in the new birth and the spiritual power associated with such an experience, then we can move to a debate over historical continuity. In other words, we can then advance to a discussion about whether or not the new birth and the life-transforming faith that millions of people claim to have experienced is what defines (primarily) an evangelical today (or in the 19th century or in the 20th century). A lot of early American historians who study the eighteenth-century, whether they have a stake in twenty-first century religious debates or not, have suggested that such continuity does exist. For example, Winiarski writes :

Incited by Whitefield and fascinated by miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit–visions, bodily fits, and sudden conversions–countless New Englanders broke ranks with family, neighbors, and ministers who dismissed their religious experiences as delusive enthusiasm. These new converts, the progenitors of today’s evangelical movement, bitterly assaulted the Congregational establishment.

But, of course, this does not mean, as Du Mez notes, that we historians should not also be concerned with change over time.

Finally, these attempts to define evangelical religion as something other than a deep spiritual commitment to an instantaneous and radical new birth remind me of the argument American religious historians have been waging for a long time about the necessity of treating religious belief as a legitimate category of analysis rather than as a guise for something else.

The First Great Awakening, and the larger evangelical movement, as understood in its 18th-century context, was a ultimately a religious movement–a movement about spiritual experience informed by an encounter with God through the new birth. This encounter, many believed, had the potential to transform a person’s life and launch it in a new direction characterized by service to Jesus Christ. When historians make it primarily about something else–the coming of the American Revolution, a manifestation of racism and patriarchy, an example of consumer culture–they miss what the movement meant to its participants and they undermine spiritual belief and lived religion as a legitimate category of analysis.

So why am I making such a big deal about how to define 18th-century evangelicals? Because I will address this question in my next post in the context of the fallout from the Kidd-Merritt debate and the role I played in it. And yes, Phillis Wheatley will be mentioned! 🙂

(This is the first post in a series on the word “evangelical” in the eighteenth-century and today).

If the Jonathan Merritt dust-up had a positive result, it was that it got historians thinking again about the meaning of the word “evangelical.” There has been a lot of good Twitter banter on the subject.

(Caveat: My criticism of Merritt had less to do with the definition of “evangelical” and more to do with his attack on a historian I respect and the idea of historical expertise in general. If you go to his Twitter page he says that I attacked his credentials and platform. He is right. I did criticize his platform, but not because I don’t think he uses it well or it is bad to have a platform. I criticized his platform because I wanted to make clear that his Twitter followers and “influencer” accolades do not qualify him to denounce historians like Thomas Kidd, a historian who has spend his whole career studying a subject. In other words, you cannot simply dismiss decades of scholarship in a few tweets. But I digress).

In the age of Trump, everyone seems to have a definition of the word “evangelical.” As Linford Fisher has argued in a recent essay in Religion & American Culture, the meaning of “evangelical” has been contested for a long time.

What is interesting to me is the way that evangelicals and former evangelicals seem to be so invested in the definition of the term. Everyone is angling for a definition that will support their present-day understanding of American religious life. Some are ex-evangelicals or progressive evangelicals trying to find a usable past to justify their belief that white evangelicals are racists, patriarchal, too wed to nationalism, etc. Others are descendants of the neo-evangelical movement that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s and want to find a historic definition of evangelicalism that helps them strengthen that identity in the present.

There is nothing wrong with trying to find a usable past. The past must always speak to the present in some way. But when we get caught up in searching for a usable past there is always a danger of forgetting that the past is a foreign country. This is especially the case when we start to dabble in eighteenth-century evangelical history, the subject of the debate between Kidd and Merritt. And when you bring an African-American poet like Phillis Wheatley into the mix, the debates will take on added weight.

So let’s start first with the meaning of the word “evangelical” in the 18th-century British Atlantic World. (I say “British Atlantic World” and not “13 Colonies” because historians of the 18th-century English-speaking world are in almost universal agreement that we cannot understand what is going on in British North America without understanding these colonies as part of a larger culture that spanned the Atlantic and included Scotland, Wales, Ireland, the Caribbean, and other so-called British provinces. Today the students in my “Colonial America” answered a final exam question on this very topic. My favorite book on this subject is Ned Landsman, From Colonials to Provincials: American Thought and Culture, 1680-1760).

As Fisher, and more recently Daniel Silliman, has noted, the word “evangelical” has pre-18th century origins. But in the 1730s and 1740s, a distinct Protestant culture emerged that was centered around a belief in the “new birth” or the “born-again” experience. The phrase comes from the Gospel of John when Jesus said to Nicodemus, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” (John 3:3). There was an eighteenth-century religious movement that rose-up around the idea of the “New Birth and the inward-looking pietism that came with such an experience. Some used the adjective “evangelical” to describe this movement and to separate it from other forms of Christianity that may have still believed in something akin to a born-again experience, but did not privilege it. (I should add that I am talking here about the word “evangelical.” The word “evangelicalism” does not appear in any 18th-century works published in America in the 18th century or at least the books, pamphlets, and broadsides that appear in the Evans Early American Imprints database).

For example, in Scotland those who favored the new birth and the Holy Spirit-infused experiential piety that it produced were called, and called themselves, the “Evangelical Party.” (As distinguished from a “Moderate” Presbyterian party that drew heavily from the Scottish Enlightenment and opposed revivalism). It is telling that when the champions of evangelical religion who founded the College of New Jersey at Princeton needed a new president in 1768 they turned to the Scottish clergyman John Witherspoon because he was the leader of Scotland’s Evangelical Party. There was clearly a transatlantic evangelical movement that was discernible and real and it was defined by a commitment to the new birth.

David Bebbington’s frequently cited quadrilateral definition–conversionism, biblicism, activism, and crucicentrism–masks far more than it illuminates the popular religious cultures of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic. In New England, Whitefield’s fascination with conversion as an instantaneous event was quite unlike the more traditional seventeenth-century puritan morphology of conversion, which ministers and lay people often conceptualized as a lifelong pilgrimage through the wilderness of the world. Although provincial Congregationalists were steeped in the scriptures, during the Whitefieldian revivals and the decades that followed new converts such as Hannah Corey learned to think of the Bible as a detextualized voice that pierced their minds with supernatural force…The “people called New Lights” diverged from their puritan ancestors in two specific ways: their preoccupation with Whitefield’s definition of the new birth and their fascination with biblical impulses.

It appears that those scholars, like Winiarski, who do not have a political or religious stake in the historical meaning of the word “evangelical” today seem to have no problem using the term or identifying it primarily with a theological/spiritual definition. Winiarski uses “evangelical,” “evangelicalism,” “New Lights,” and “Whitefiedarians” as synonyms. Whatever “evangelical” or “evangelicalism” means today, it was always understood as a spiritual movement in the eighteenth century.

So Winiarski seems to think that there was definitely some kind of spiritual “movement” that we can describe as “evangelical.” He is not alone. These works also make a similar case:

Frank Lambert’s Pedlar in Divinity: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals (Princeton University Press, 1999)

Mark Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys (Inter-Varsity Press, 2011).

John Fea, “Wheelock’s World: Letters and the Communication of Revival in Great Awakening New England,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 2001).

So I think it is safe to say that there was an evangelical movement in the 18th-century. It revolved primarily around a commitment to the New Birth. All of the authors above would also agree that changes in consumer culture, print culture, increased human mobility, celebrity, and other non-religious factors became staples of this movement or helped it grow, but these are all secondary factors in explaining what the movement was, in essence, all about.

I will stop there. In my next post I want to talk about some folks who want to define evangelical as primarily something other than a spiritual movement. And I also eventually want to discuss how Phillis Wheatley may or may not be related to this eighteenth-century movement.

Hail, happy Saint, on thy immortal throne!To thee complaints of grievance are unknown;We hear no more the music of thy tongue,Thy wonted auditories cease to throng.Thy lessons in unequal’d accents flow’d!While emulation in each bosom glow’d;Thou didst, in strains of eloquence refin’d,Inflame the soul, and captivate the mind.Unhappy we, the setting Sun deplore!Which once was splendid, but it shines no more;He leaves this earth for Heav’n’s unmeasur’d height,And worlds unknown, receive him from our sight;There WHITEFIELD wings, with rapid course his way,And sails to Zion, through vast seas of day.

Then she implored her fellow African Americans to accept Whitefield’s savior.

Take HIM ye Africans, he longs for you;Impartial SAVIOUR, is his title due;If you will chuse to walk in grace’s road,You shall be sons, and kings, and priests to GOD.

A variant edition of the poem ended that line with, “He’ll make you free, and kings, and priests to God.” This undoubtedly reflected Wheatley’s desire for her fellow slaves.

The pursuit of knowledge begins with a definition of terms. What is your definition? If self-identification, did she? If denominational affiliation, was she? If Bebbington’s quadrilateral, did she assent? If you can’t answer the question, you might need to think on this some more

These are all legitimate questions. The meaning of the word “evangelical” has been debated by historians for a long time. And this debate is raging again in the age of Trump.

But then Merritt tells one of the most prolific American religious historians of this generation to “think on this some more.” I guess this is the kind of bravado that comes when Outreach Magazine names you one of the “30 young influencers reshaping Christian leadership.” Just for the record, here are just some of Kidd’s books:

The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (Yale University Press, 2009)

George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father (Yale University Press, 2016)

God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution (Basic Books, 2010)

American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism (Princeton University Press).

I think its fair to say Tommy Kidd has done some “thinking on this” topic.

At this point in the exchange Merritt has wandered into the deep end of the pool only to prove that he is not a very good swimmer. He follows his “think about this” line with a bold, strange, and inaccurate claim to his 58K Twitter followers:

Btw, “endorsing Whitfield’s new birth” is considered a working definition of “evangelical” by exactly zero scholars I know.

By the way, I just spent a week in my colonial America class at Messiah College reading Yale historian’s Harry Stout’s Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism with my students. One of the central premises of the book is that the “evangelical” movement in the eighteenth-century was characterized by those who, to use Merritt’s phrase, endorsed “Whitfield’s (sic) new birth.”

And here is a description of Peter Choi’s recent book on Whitefield titled George Whitefield: Evangelists for God and Empire (foreword by Mark Noll): “GEORGE WHITEFIELD (1714–1770) is remembered as a spirited revivalist, a catalyst for the Great Awakening, and a founder of the evangelical movement in America.”

And here is Frank Lambert in Pedlar in Divinity: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals (Princeton University Press, 1994): “By printing and preaching throughout the colonies Whitefield standardized evangelicalism. He created a common language of the new birth that evangelicals everywhere employed to distinguish themselves from those who had not undergone a spiritual conversion.” (p.131).

Perhaps Merritt doesn’t “know” these scholars.

But back in real time, Kidd responds to Merritt’s “exactly zero scholars” line with references to some of the best American religious historians working today. He could have cited his own books, but instead he cites Catherine Brekus and Bruce Hindmarsh.

Merritt responds to his 58K Twitter followers. Remember, Merritt fashions himself as a public intellectual who “trains hundreds of young writers” and is a “sought after speaker at colleges, conferences, and churches.” (Also, don’t forget he writes for The Atlantic). He decides to pontificate with a vast and universal claim:

Here is a former editor of an evangelical magazine and an evangelical historian and writer and neither of you can (or will) actually define the word. And people wonder why the word is in crisis.

…And then the same tweeter calls @jwilson1812 a “cranky uncle.” Let’s remember that this “uncle” is same guy who has spent his entire career cultivating an evangelical mind through the editorship of one of the most thoughtful magazines in U.S. evangelical history. https://t.co/m0ofggMZwK

Kidd is a bigger man than I am. I can’t let Merritt get away with this:

Actually, “go read my books” is something someone says when they’ve spent 2 decades studying a topic & someone on twitter, unprovoked I might add, thinks he knows more about the topic. And then when the expert corrects him the tweeter doubles-down on the criticism. https://t.co/HJwIzOoSYj

The Age of Trump has seen a “Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laymen.” The collapse characterizes writers across the spectrum. Even certain Trump-haters mimic his boorish tactics. https://t.co/EXXwtDWFMj

As a veteran governmental adviser and think-tank participant, Nichols (National Security Affairs/U.S. Naval War Coll.; No Use: Nuclear Weapons and U.S. National Security, 2013, etc.) has experienced firsthand the decline of respect accorded specialists in manydisciplines, as the internet has leveled the playing field to the point where all opinions are more or less considered equal, and a Google search substitutes for decades of research. “These are dangerous times,” he writes. “Never have so many people had access to so much knowledge, and yet been so resistant to learning anything,” However, the author sounds less like an alarmist than like a genial guide through the wilderness of ignorance. There are no startling revelations. Media in general and social media in particular tend to function as echo chambers, reinforcing biases. Some of those whose conclusions are the shakiest tend to shout the loudest, basing their arguments on spurious evidence. Credentials are suspect in an age when university degrees are everywhere, grade inflation runs rampant, and colleges woo prospective students as customers and clients. Little wonder, then, that “if in a previous era too much deference was paid to experts, today there is little deference paid to anyone at all.” Students challenge teachers, patients challenge doctors, and so-called experts argue with other so-called experts (often in territory beyond the expertise of either). “People who claim they are ‘experts’ are sometimes only about as self-aware as people who think they’re good kissers,” he writes. Not that Nichols lets the experts off the hook—some hide behind the impenetrability of academic jargon; others have even faked the data or cooked the books. The answer to this pervasive problem lies in greater media literary and in citizens having a better idea as to what they can trust from whom.

And now I want to give Jonathan Merritt “something to think about.” Kevin Kruse tweeted this in the context of his ongoing debate with Dinesh D’Souza about race and the Democratic Party. The content of their debate is different from the Kidd-Merritt debate (and Merritt is not a Trump supporter), but the message is the same:

“It looks like you’re about to challenge a historian, armed only with a MAGA hat and a Wikipedia page. Are you sure you want to do that?” pic.twitter.com/mEOAOBmVQf

Daniel Silliman of Valparaiso University has a very thoughtful and helpful Twitter thread on the use of the term “evangelical” in American history. I know Daniel is looking for a job in an academic history department. Someone should hire him based on this thread alone! 🙂

There are lots and lots of debates about “who is an evangelical.” I’ve contributed to some of them! But there’s another version of the question which is kind of funny but maybe illuminating: When was evangelical?

It’s curious this doesn’t come up more in discussions of Bebbington quadrilateral, the 81%, etc., etc. Scholars aren’t bound by people’s self descriptions, of course, but it’s a place to *:start*. And usage matters.

From what I can find, this is how Jonathan Edwards used it, and John Wesley too. “Evangelical” for them is not a religious group, not a name of their religious ID, but means something “of or relating to the Gospel.”

There are several instances of “Evangelical hymns” in the 1700s. They aren’t hymns for people who are evangelical. (Because there aren’t people who call themselves evangelical). They’re hymns about doctrines of salvation, as opposed to, say, advent hymns.

People we, today, might call evangelical explicitly disavow “evangelicalism.” “The Christian Observer”—a newspaper associated with William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect—said word would only be used by “some wilting scoffer,” never by “those who reverence Evangelical doctrine.”

That certainly doesn’t settle the debates about the definition of the word, who’s really evangelical, and who gets to draw those lines. It doesn’t tell you whether or not Bebbington’s quadrilateral is useful. But …

In the 2018 midterms, exit polls showed, white evangelicals backed Republicans by 75 to 22 percent, while the rest of the voting population favored Democrats 66 to 32 percent. But evangelicals were slightly less likely to support House Republicans in 2018 than they were to support Trump in 2016—which may have contributed to the Democrats’ pickup of House seats. Trump’s support actually declined more among white evangelical men than women. The 11-point gender gap between evangelical men and women from 2016 shrank to 6 in the midterms.

To be sure, evangelical Christians have been rewarded for their support of Trump after enduring eight years wandering in Barack Obama’s political desert. They have two new conservative Supreme Court justices, and there have been nine self-professed evangelical Cabinet members, plus a flurry of laws and executive orders clamping down on gender roles, abortion and LGBTQ rights. But experts say this may represent the last bounty for a waning political power. Unlike their parents, the younger generation is not animated by the culture wars; many are pushing for social justice for migrants and LGBTQ people and campaigning against mass incarceration—positions more in line with the Democratic Party.

The result is a shrinking conservative bloc, something that could weaken white Christian political power—and, consequently, a Republican Party that has staked its future on its alliance with the religious right. It’s a conundrum that the father of modern GOP conservatism, Barry Goldwater, predicted in 1994: “Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem.”

I dabble a bit with these issues in Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump and people ask about young evangelicals and Trump when I am on the road with the book. But I am apt to let the sociologists and political scientists talk about future trends. Having said that, here are a few thoughts about Burleigh’s piece:

Young evangelicals are disgusted by Trump. Some have left evangelical churches and others have abandoned Christianity altogether. I have met many of these folks on the book tour trail. On the other hand, sociologists and political scientists tell us that the connection between young evangelicals and the GOP remains strong.

Russell Moore is NOT the “president of the Southern Baptist Convention.” He is president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Church.

I think it will be interesting to see what happens once the Moral Majority generation fades from the scene. The Christian Right voters that learned how to engage politics from the likes of Jerry Falwell are still alive and still voting. These, of course, are many of the folks who voted for Trump based upon his promise of conservative Supreme Court justices and “religious liberty” issues.

Punditry, commentary and even scholarship on younger evangelicals has been around for a long time. In 1974, writer Richard Quebedeaux equated the “younger evangelicals” with the evangelical left and a commitment to social justice. In 2002, theologian Robert E. Webber said that “the younger evangelicals” were interested in what he called “the ancient-future faith,” a Christian faith that was more historical and liturgical in nature. James Davison Hunter also wrote about young evangelicals.

“This is the most ambitious and most effective voter education, get-out-the-vote program directed at the faith-based vote in a midterm election in modern political history,” Faith & Freedom Coalition President Ralph Reed said the day after the November elections.

But since turnout was up across the board, white evangelicals made up the same percentage of the electorate as they always do.

After ticking up from 23 percent of the electorate in 2004 to 24 percent in 2006 and 26 percent in 2008, the share of the white evangelical vote has been unshaken at 25 percent in 2010, 26 percent in 2012, 26 percent in 2014, and 26 percent in 2016. And in last month’s midterms, white evangelicals made up, you guessed it, 26 percent of the electorate, according to the exit polls.

As I have been saying over and over again on the Believe Mebook tour, Jerry Falwell Sr. may be the most important political figure in post-World War II America because he taught millions of white conservative evangelicals how to execute a particular political playbook and they have been executing it faithfully for almost forty years.

This summer I visited twelve independent bookstores to speak about my book Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump. These were public talks sponsored by the stores. I had no idea what kind of people would show-up. I expected verbal sparring at nearly every stop. I girded my loins (to use a biblical phrase) and prepared each night to face Trump voters who I expected to respond to my book with angry dissent. I tried to anticipate every pro-Trump talking point and prepared myself to answer to each one of them.

Things did not go as I expected. I ran into a few rabid Trump supporters. I also ran into many sober-minded, even thoughtful, Trump voters. And, as you might expect at a book talk at an independent bookstore, I met a lot of folks who occupied a political space that is left of center.

But each night I also met people–sometimes many people–like Elizabeth Baker of Katy, Texas. Here is what Baker had to say recently in a piece she wrote for the Huffington Post:

I don’t sleep through the night anymore. I suffer from near daily panic attacks and almost constant anxiety. The source of my joy, my security and my identity has vanished, leaving me with an angry grief that almost no one in my immediate circle understands. I have relationships that were once life-giving but have turned toxic. I feel manipulated, deceived and abused. And why?

The church that raised me is gaslighting me.

I am a 39-year-old, white, straight, suburban mom. And I am a Christian ― at least I think I still am. I grew up in a privileged bubble, in deep red Republican country, where identifying as a Christian didn’t set me apart from the majority of my peers. Being a Christian certainly wasn’t any risk to my life or reputation. I spent my childhood in Sunday school, church camp and youth group, learning Bible stories about heroes who battled a giant with a slingshot, survived a lions’ den due to unshakable faith, and led an entire group of people out of slavery and into a promised land.

The church also taught me the story of Jesus, the son of God, whom God sent to earth as a defenseless human infant. Jesus spent 33 completely sinless years on this planet, only to be brutally murdered as a sacrifice for me, because of me. I was born with my sinful nature and no matter how good I try to be, how many prayers I pray or Bible study gatherings I attend, I am ultimately a sinner ― and the wages of sin is death. According to the church, I deserve death, simply for existing.

But the church also claims there’s good news! Even though I deserve death, Jesus’ bloody crucifixion and subsequent bodily resurrection saves me from a fiery eternal hell ― all because I believe this supernatural story and earnestly accept the gift of his grace. And because of this sacrifice, I owe him a lifetime of gratitude, worship and a commitment to follow his commandments (even though, because of my human flesh, I will always ultimately fail him).

Night after night men and women like Baker waited in line for me to sign their books and tell me their stories. One young man thanked me for writing the book and then said that he felt more at home spiritually in the bookstore that night than he usually does at his own evangelical church. His eyes were filled with tears as he told me about the like-minded people he met in the audience and how freeing it was to talk to them. It was clear that many of these folks had a lot to get off their chests about evangelicalism and they saw me as a sympathetic ear. Sometimes I tried to offer encouragement, other times I joined them in their lament, sometimes I prayed with them, but most of the time I just listened. (And if you know me, listening is not always one of my strong suits. I’m working on it, though!).

I did not expect this.

As I read Baker’s piece, I thought again about all the people I met this summer. Here is another taste:

It simply does not matter to the evangelical church that Trump is racist and that his dehumanizing rhetoric is emboldening radicals and costing Americans their lives. Americans are dying in mass shootings at the hands of white supremacists, while the church is celebrating the nation’s return to traditional values. For Christians who reject the MAGA mindset, this is absolute crazy making.

No wonder I live with crippling anxiety and spiritual trauma. The church that warned me against moral relativism now calls me a heretic when I apply the very principles they taught me to real situations, with real stakes for real people. I don’t know where to turn or whom to trust. Is any of it true? Have I wasted my life on a religion that hurts more than it helps?

I stopped attending church regularly almost two years ago, but I am more invested in my spiritual life than ever before. Although I’ve lost the majority of my local Christian community, save for a few precious friends, I still cling to the true teachings and example of Jesus to inform my politics and moral code. I now understand that Scripture pays more attention to serving the needs of the oppressed than to regulating their lifestyle. Sin is not as much about my behavior as it is about my inability to love people well.

Meanwhile, I’ve diversified my bookshelf, podcast subscriptions and Twitter feed to include voices speaking truth to power from the perspective of marginalized people ― the same voices that the Trump administration continually tries to silence. I’ve joined online communities of people also working through spiritual trauma and gaslighting by the evangelical church. This fall, I attended the Evolving Faith conference, a gathering of more than 1,500 people in different stages of the deconstructing of their faith. As I’ve worked through my grief and anger, I’ve discovered I am not as isolated as I once believed. My hope is to someday find a local church again, one that is progressive, open and affirming, but I am not actively searching.

I wish the evangelical church would wake up and realize how many of us there are out there feeling manipulated and abused. This community of wanderers is dealing with grief both privately and collectively. Together we weep, we rage and we try to rebuild what’s left of our shattered spiritual lives. Healing is slow and it’s painful. I’m working hard to separate the true, worthy parts of Christianity from the bullshit. I do hope to return to church someday, but I will never again be gaslighted by an institution that sells out Jesus for political power.

Most of the people in this picture–the court evangelicals– would probably fall into categories 1-2 below.

I just discovered religion journalist Terry Mattingly’s “evangelical-voters typology.” (I am assuming he means “white” evangelicals). He lays out six types of white evangelical approaches to Donald Trump. If you are a white evangelical, which category best fits your relationship to the POTUS?

(1) Many evangelicals supported Trump from the get-go. For them, Trump is great and everything is going GREAT.

(2) Other evangelicals may have supported Trump early on, but they have always seen him as a flawed leader — but the best available. They see him as complicated and evolving and are willing to keep their criticisms PRIVATE.

(3) There are evangelicals who moved into Trump’s tent when it became obvious he would win the GOP nomination. They think he is flawed, but they trust him to – at least – protect their interests, primarily on First Amendment issues.

(4) Then there are the lesser-of-two-evils Trump evangelicals who went his way in the general election, because they could not back Hillary Clinton under any circumstances. They believe Trump’s team has done some good, mixed with quite a bit of bad, especially on race and immigration. They think religious conservatives must be willing to criticize Trump — in public.

(5) There are evangelicals who never backed Trump and they never will. Many voted for third-party candidates. They welcome seeing what will happen when Trump team people are put under oath and asked hard questions. … However, they are willing to admit that Trump has done some good, even if in their heart of hearts they’d rather be working with President Mike Pence.

(6) Folks on the evangelical left simply say, “No Trump, ever.” Anything he touches is bad and must be rejected. Most voted for Clinton and may have yearned for Bernie Sanders.

I am probably in group 6, although I don’t define myself as part of the “evangelical left.” (Although I am not sure I really have any other place to go right now).

If 81% of white evangelicals voters pulled a lever for Trump, they would all find themselves in the first four categories. I would like to see a breakdown of the 81% by these six categories.

We had a good discussion at my dinner table tonight about the Fourth National Climate Assessment. As a young evangelical, my seventeen-year old daughter is passionate about this issue and it was fun to see her so engaged. She is appalled at Donald Trump’s refusal to believe the findings. By the way, she will cast for her vote a president for the first time in 2020. She is heading off to a yet-to-be-determined Christian college in the Fall and will represent, I pray, the future leadership of the church on this issue and others.

As I said before, I think evangelicals must take this report seriously and treat it as a “life” issue. Sadly, I think most evangelicals will ignore it or shrug it off because they are afraid it will divide their churches. But my prayer is that some pastors and church leaders will have the courage to confront this head-on. If your evangelical church is addressing this is in some meaningful and purposeful way I would love to hear about it.

What should we make of the death of a twenty-seven-year-old missionary at the hands of an indigenous tribe on North Sentinel Island off the coast of India? On Sunday we published Kate Carte’s twitterstorm on the subject. Yesterday I linked to Ryu Spaeth’s piece at The New Republic. Since then, evangelical historian Thomas Kidd has weighed-in at The Gospel Coalition. The story has also elicited several interesting comments at my Facebook page.

Frankly, this story has so many moving parts that I am not sure I have a “take” on it. It is a tragic story on all sides. I have mixed feelings about Chau’s death.

Here are a few thoughts:

1.This is one of those cases where people of Christian faith who believe in the Great Commission (Mt. 28) might see it differently from those who are not Christians. As an evangelical myself, I understand and sympathize with Chau’s zeal and his desire to convert the inhabitants of North Sentinel Island. Chau was passionate about his faith and his desire to share it with others. Conversionism, missionary work, and evangelism are at the heart of evangelical faith. Historically, this kind of passion and zeal has often led to martyrdom. I am reminded of my friend who I wrote about in Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump. He signed his letters to fellow Christians with these words: “May you suffer and die for Christ.”

I am not saying here that Chau deserves to be called a “martyr.” I am saying that Chau is not the first person to die proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ.

The Great Commission is one of the reasons I remain an evangelical. If you are a Christian and do not believe in evangelism, missions, or “making disciples” in the world then you need to explain to me why you take Jesus’s words seriously in some places of the Gospels (love your neighbor, caring for the poor, etc.) and not in Matthew 28:16-20. It seems to me that the Great Commission of Matthew 28 is something more than simply, “go into the world and do acts of social justice.” If this is what the Great Commission means, then I am not sure how Christianity is any different than the Peace Corps or some other non-religious agency. It seems to me that the requirement to “make disciples” and “baptize them in the name of the Father and the Son and of the Holy Spirit” requires something more. Chau took this call seriously.

2. Unfortunately, Chau was not a good steward of his passion and his commitment to the Great Commission. He was a young man. He had the potential of reaching so many lives with the good news of the Gospel. We need more people in the church with his zeal for evangelism. Sadly, we will never get to witness his future ministry.

3. Christians have abused the Great Commission in ways that have led to violence, death, genocide, slavery, and other forms of imperialism. Kate Carte is right about the so-called Pilgrim (and Puritan) invasion. This is a history that today’s evangelicals must confront and I have spent the better of my career trying to get my fellow evangelicals to confront it. But I am thankful, at least when it comes to missiology, that some thoughtful evangelicals have confronted it. I don’t know of any missiologist teaching at a reputable evangelical theological seminary who would endorse the kind of imperialism practiced by the Pilgrims, 19th-century missionaries, or even 20th-century missionaries. Moreover, I do not think contemporary missiologists would endorse Chau’s approach either. His approach is not representative of evangelical missionary activity today.

4. Over at my Facebook page, historian Jonathan Couser writes that he “does not consider Chau a true missionary.” He reminds us that the term “missionary” means “one who is sent” (from Latin, missus). This, Couser writes, “implies authorization, commission from a sending church or agency. So far as I understand, no church SENT Chau. He got it into his own head to undertake a lone-wolf mission to an isolated people.” This is a great point. There is a reason why missionaries do not go to North Sentinel Island. Churches and missions organizations bring wisdom, history, scholarship, and experience to the missionary endeavor. Perhaps Chau did consult with a “sending” organization and simply ignored the advice. Perhaps a “sending” organization would have been aware of the health risk he posed to the Sentinelese.

And now the attempt to recover Chau’s body has put others at risk. It does not seem like he thought this through. This is what happens when missionaries go rogue.

5. Chau’s failure to work as part of the global Christian or missionary community is an example of the individualism at the heart of Western evangelicalism. Chau’s trip to North Sentinel Island seems to have combined evangelical individualism with the adventure/adrenaline culture popular among American millennials today. Chau seems to have ignored the wisdom of the church and the voices of other Christians in his life.

6. A lot has been made of Chau breaking Indian law by going to the North Sentinel Island. No argument here. But like Ryu Spaeth, I wonder when it is appropriate to break border laws and when it is not. Is it appropriate to interpret Chau’s actions in the context of America’s immigration debate? Many liberals and progressives defend undocumented immigrants crossing the border in the name of justice and compassion. Others disagree. Those who disagree suggest that undocumented immigrants are dangerous or a threat to American society. They thus defend strict border control and punishment for those who enter the United States illegally. (Caveat: I am talking here about immigrants, not asylum seekers).

In Chau’s case, he understood his arrival on New Sentinel Island as an act of love and compassion. He believed so strongly in the evangelical message of salvation that he thought it was worth breaking the law so that he could deliver this message to the Sentinelese. Why such a strong defense of North Sentinel Island borders, but not such a strong defense of U.S. borders? When should love and compassion define our understand of borders and when should it not? Do we only break the law for the ideas and moral principles that we like?

7. As a Christian, I believe in the dignity of all human beings. I thus believe murder is wrong. I understand that the Sentinelese acted in self-defense. But in the end, a life was lost. This should cause us to grieve. Murder is murder and life is life, whether the Sentinelese are noble savages or not. Of course one might also say the same thing about Chau. His arrival on the island put human lives at risk.

Tragic indeed.

Addendum: It appears that Chau did indeed work with a missions agency. Kate Shellnut at Christianity Today reports that he was a missionary with All Nations missions.

Addendum #2: At 12:14 am on November 27, 2018 I edited points 3 and 6 for clarity.

Politics is the conversations we have and the decisions we make about how we should live together. You have claimed that your political support for Trump is not a reflection of your own beliefs about race but is about issues such as abortion—appointing more conservative judges to the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. But PRRI and The Atlantic have revealed a deeper reason for your support. When their 2018 Voter Engagement Survey asked many of you if you believed the nation would be better or worse off when people of color are in the majority, 52 percent of you responded that the impact would be “mostly negative.” It seems many of you want a white nation.

It is no wonder, then, that so many of you have supported Trump with unwavering loyalty. He promised you the golden crown, the Supreme Court, the key to winning your culture war and winning back white supremacy. He is holding up his end of the deal—and so are you.

At best, many of you have been silent. At worst, many of you have led cheers for Trump as he separated families and left babies on floors in cages, removed protection from refugees, threatened people of color through changes in the courts and policing system, removed protection from poor communities and communities of color threatened by toxic dumping on their lands, proposed removing funding from poor schools, and tried hard to remove health insurance from 30 million struggling individuals.

White evangelical church, this is your witness. You have become evidence of forces hell-bent on subordinating people of color and crushing the image of God. Repent and believe the gospel.

Jeremiah 29:7: “But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”

What might the application of this verse mean for the evangelical role in fighting climate change? How might creation care and environmental justice help the “welfare” of the cities where live and work? For me and many others, this is a “life” issue. It is something that churches must address as part of their missions.

Climate science isn’t questioned at Wheaton College the way it often is in the wider evangelical community. The school is a brick-and-mortar rebuttal to the myth that science and religion must be at odds with each other. When Wheaton students step into their-state-of-the-art science building, for instance, they are greeted with signs stating that a “sound Biblical theology gives us a proper basis for scientific inquiry,” and a display featuring locally excavated Perry the Mastodon, which carbon dating shows to be more than 13,000 years old.

The school is not alone in intertwining commitments to love God and protect the earth, often referred to as “creation care.” The Cape Town Commitment, a global agreement between evangelical leaders from nearly 200 countries, includes acknowledgement of climate change and how it will hurt the world’s poor (and it is required reading for Wheaton freshmen). Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University and an evangelical, has been an outspoken advocate for climate action. And in addition to YECA, there are numerous groups active in this arena, including the Evangelical Climate Initiative, Climate Caretakers, Care of Creation and A Rocha.

In late 2015, the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE)—the biggest umbrella group of evangelicals in the country, representing 43 million Americans—issued a statement accepting climate change, acknowledging the human contribution to it and encouraging action. YECA’s advocacy helped bring that statement, called “Loving the Least of These,” into being. In it, NAE argues that Christians should be compelled to care about climate change as a matter of social justice, equating those without the resources to adapt to failed farming or dry wells or rising seas as the modern-day equivalents of the widows and orphans of Jesus’s day.

Over at VOX, Tara Isabella Burton tackles this issue. She wonders why so many evangelical leaders reject anti-immigration rhetoric and so many of their followers embrace it.

Here is a taste:

From his dismissal of “shithole countries” to his attempts to institute a “Muslim travel ban,” from his incendiary rhetoric about Mexican immigrants being rapists and criminals, to his latest attempts to prevent the Honduran migrants to seeking asylum, Trump’s approach to borders has been one of nativism and insularity by protecting (his idea of white) America at the expense of everyone else. And, by and large, white evangelicals on the ground have followed suit — even when some in evangelical leadership is advocating for more nuanced policy positions.

The reasons for this discrepancy are complicated. They include a white evangelical population that gets its moral sense as much from conservative media as it does from scripture. There’s also a more general conflation of white evangelicalism with the GOP party agenda, which has been intensifying since the days of the Moral Majority in the 1980s.

As Jenny Yang, vice president for advocacy and policy for World Relief, the humanitarian wing of the National Association for Evangelicals, told Vox,white evangelicals’ views on immigration are more likely to be shaped “not from their local church or their pastor, but actually from the news media. … This has become an issue of the church being discipled by the media more than the Bible or the local pastor in terms of their views on immigration.”

Ed Stetzer, a Christian author and commentator who leads the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, agreed. “White evangelicals are more shaped on this issue by Republican views,” he told Vox. “They’re being discipled by their cable news network of choice and by their social media feeds.” He pointed out that, while white evangelicals are more likely than other religious voting blocs to express conservative views on immigration, they don’t necessarily do so at greater rates than nonwhite evangelical Republicans.

In other words, the political views of white evangelicals may say far more about their party affiliation than it does about their theological identity. In the Trump era, in particular, white evangelical Christianity and nativist political isolation have become particularly intertwined. Trump, his administration, and its allies have used the language of Christian nationalism to shore up their political base.

Initial Election Day results showed that a significant chunk of Latino men and women voted in favor of DeSantis, who once cautioned Florida voters not to “monkey this up” by electing Gillum as their next governor. According to the numbers, 46 percent of Hispanic men voted for the GOP candidate while 38 percent of women did the same.

Social media critics couldn’t help but notice the trend, and were left scratching their heads over how Latinos could vote for someone who’s backed President Donald Trump‘s tough stance on immigration.

“At some point we need to have a frank and non-judgmental conversation about these Hispanic numbers,” Twitter user @chukroxx opined. “I don’t understand them … And, emotionally, it mid-key stings. What’s happening here y’all?”

“I’m truly just tryna comprehend,” he continued. What about the republican platform is so inviting? Especially considering their immigration stances? Why wasn’t the racism Desantis off putting?”

Radio host Ebro Darden offered this explanation: “Some Latinos are white and even racist against Black & Brown. Many are evangelicals … just cause someone makes seasoned food and is stereotyped by the oppressor as murderous and criminal does not mean they don’t wanna be just like their oppressor.”

Other Twitter users chimed with their own ideas, pointing out some Latino’s allegiance to America prompts them to vote red.

I don’t know much about the Latino electorate in Florida, but I wonder if they voted for DeSantis because he is pro-life on abortion. Many Latinos are evangelicals who take traditional positions on social and cultural issues. Perhaps they placed their moral commitments over identity politics. Just a thought. Perhaps someone who knows more about this subject might be able to offer some insight.

It seems like the same argument could be made in other gubernatorial races as well.